Horowitz Neocons Push False Left-Right Paradigm

Kurt NimmoI am either a member of the Zionist Mafia “criminal network,” as the sacked GCN radio talk show host Daryl Bradford Smith would have it, or I am a pro-Ba’athist neo-Nazi, as the Jabotinsky Israeli Steven Plaut claims. Of course, you can’t have it both ways—or maybe you can, considering the false left-right paradigm that declares a difference between Republicans and Democrats, Marxists and Fascists, Hamas and Likud Party, etc.

All of these folks believe in and practice the one-party state, authoritarianism, squashing the opposition, and curtailing dissent. Daryl Bradford Smith declares his desire over podcasts to line up all members of the “criminal network” and shoot them (as both Marxists and Jacobins liked to do, although the later preferred the guillotine), while Plaut’s hatred of the so-called “left”—because, as a radical Jabotinskyite, he believes all “leftists” want to destroy Israel—results in vicious diatribes, ad hominem attacks, and disguised monkey business exploiting open-publishing forums.

As an example of how muddy the political waters are these days, consider Ben Johnson, managing editor of David Horowitz’s FrontPage Magazine, writing Paul Craig Roberts off as a conspiracy-mongering UFO-chaser because Roberts stated the obvious—the United States will eventually attack Iran as it attacked Iraq. “The Roberts-Raimondo-Rockwell wing of conservatism has become the nexus where extremist fantasies of Left and Right converge into a toxic mixture of venomous lunacy,” writes Johnson. “The ‘Old Right-New Left Alliance’ dates back to Murray Rothbard’s protests in the Vietnam era but revived during the rise of Pat Buchanan-style protectionism and isolationism; 9/11 has given it a new vibrancy altogether.” In fact, Raimondo and Rockwell are Libertarians and Roberts and Buchanan are paleoconservatives, that is to say real conservatives, not Trotskyite Straussian neocons, as we can only assume Johnson is as the managing editor of an avowed neocon online magazine.

Johnson uses yours truly as an example of somebody out on the “far-Left,” even though, as reading this blog should reveal for those who pay attention, I am not an advocate of socialism or MoveOn dot org, I don’t like Fidel Castro or do I worship the ghost of Che Guevara, I think most so-called revolutionary movements are unmitigated disasters, believe America should be a constitutional republic, and I support without reservation the entire Bill of Rights, especially the Second Amendment.

Leftists believe in the primacy of the state (it simply needs to be a “progressive” government, that is to say the state should steal money from one sector of society and give it to another, the obverse of the Bushian “conservatives” who believe in corporate welfare and kleptocracy).

But there I go, explaining things in the context of the false left-right paradigm. Instead, let’s say there are two sides to the political coin—those who believe in government and bow down in praise of it and those who mistrust and avoid government, as did the founders, in particular Thomas Jefferson. Straussian neocons, as students of Machiavelli and both Leo Strauss and the Nazi Carl Schmitt, hate Thomas Jefferson and the idea of a constitutionally-limited republic. For their fear-mongering to work, a dictatorship is the preferred form of government.

I’d describe myself as a constitutionalist, or loosely a Libertarian, although the latter contains an unhealthy strain of Objectivism. Far too many Objectivists believe in military interventionism, in other words they are little different than the Straussian neocons and their ilk in this regard. Objectivism is responsible for muddled minds—for instance the economic mind of the “Honorable” Alan Greenspan, the recently retired central banker, who was at one time an Ayn Rand neophyte.

Straussian neocons are either unwilling or unable to accept that libertarians are philosophically opposed to the Iraqi invasion and occupation. For instance, in his article Johnson comes down hard on Lew Rockwell, a libertarian—or more precisely, an anarcho-capitalist in the tradition of paleolibertarianism—and accuses him of cavorting with the Far Left in his opposition to the “war,” in other words an illegal invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation predicated on a passel of lies.

According to Johnson, the “Rockwellites have birthed a rhetoric that is at once indistinguishable from the far-Left and the White-Wing” (in other words, Rockwell agrees with white supremacists, as does apparently the Left—thus, in the absurd reductive mind of Steven Plaut, we are all neo-Nazis). For neocons, opposition to the “war” is America-hating treason, fifth column sedition, even “communist” (a bizarre accusation coming from a movement tracing its beginning back to Trotskyism and the Marxism of Max Shachtman—even David Horowitz was a Marxist before he become a neocon). Never mind that at most antiwar demonstrations one would be hard pressed to throw a stone and hit a bona fide communist in the head.

As Straussian neocons, Ben Johnson and the Horowitz crew, funded by the CIA operative Richard Scaife, believe they can demonize the opposition by hitching the paleoconservatives (or real conservatives) and libertarians up with the likes of International ANSWER and Code Pink. Of course, this works if you are the average Rush Limbaugh listener or even a regular reader of FrontPage, but for those of us capable of distinguishing political nuances and unwilling to buy into the false left-right paradigm pushed by the neocons, it is a dead duck.